I am delighted to have been picked as a This Girl Can person although I do feel a bit more like This Girl Currently Can’t But This Girl Might Be Able To rather than This Girl Can. Time will only tell!

I’m not new to swimming, I used to swim every week, walk a couple of hours a day, ride horses and was self-employed (as a storyteller and social worker) driving about 500 miles a week. My life was busy and full and, it is fair to say that, I lived life at several hundred miles an hour. On the 14^th March 2020, I went down with Covid and life has never been the same again. I had a couple of stays in hospital and several months at home battling it out with Kevin. I called Covid, Kevin and that was the start of the worst relationship I’ve ever been in, and that is saying something. More than a year later and I am left with a list of symptoms and various body damages as a lifelong keepsake, a life very different to pre Kevin and 3 extra stone of blubber about my being.

The whole experience has taken me to some pretty dark places but I was lucky, I had a brilliant Dad who always said that you never have to look very far to see someone worse off than yourself. My Dad taught me to be curious about life and to enjoy adventures, loads of them. Sadly, my Dad had Motor Neurone Disease but, when he was ill, I used to say to him that, for everything that he could no longer do, we would replace it with something new and we managed to turn his illness into an adventure. It was this example, set to me early in life, that led me to throw myself in cold, muddy rivers in a bid to kick Kevin out of the park. I could no longer walk very far, do much other than fester on the sofa with endless Netflix series, but I could float in a muddy river, even if it was just for a couple of minutes.

I saw the This Girl Can initiative culminating in the Henley Mile swim and it grabbed my attention. Apart from the really cool DryRobe, Selkie hoodie, tow float, magazine and other delicious goodies as prizes, apart from the challenge, apart from being able to be part of a group of people aiming for the same thing and supporting one another, the swim is on my Dad’s birthday and I reckon he would like that. So, if This Girl Can or This Girl Can’t, remains to be seen but I do know that my Dad, wherever he is, will be cheering me on with yet another adventure and that makes me smile.

So, here’s to a fabulous, albeit a flippin chilly, adventure.